Let us start with Madeleine's books. Jane Austen, George Eliot and Edith Wharton. Yes, she is an incurable romantic, but there was nothing romantic about her on this, her graduation day, from Brown University. She was dishevelled from the night before; her dress had an awkward stain and she was trying to avoid her parents' disapprobation by spending time with her friend, Mitchell.

"I still don't fancy you, but I thought you should know that me and Leonard just split up," she said. "Why am I supposed to care?" Mitchell replied, a question readers would soon be asking themselves.

So how did Madeleine's love life get to this point? In her first year at Brown in 1979, she had had many admirers but had remained faithful to her fictional male leading characters, but at some point during the semiotics option she had been persuaded that everything was text and that since she herself was a character in a novel there was no real need to differentiate between Mr Darcy and any of the other students. There followed 50 pages of Barthesian banter and an equally masturbatory relationship with a boy named Billy, which ended when the mirror being held up to the reader broke. For a while thereafter, Madeleine sought comfort in Mitchell, a religious studies student, and might even once have allowed him to have sex with her, had he not been so frozen by her beauty. As it was, the moment passed and she began an affair with Leonard, a dazzlingly semi-detached science undergraduate.

"I love you," she said, as he came inside her.

"Barthes says that once the first avowal has been made, 'I love you' has no meaning," Leonard replied. Rather than recognising that Leonard was a bit of a tosser, Madeleine fell even deeper in love with Leonard as she had read that Barthes had also said that love is extreme solitude. So their relationship continued until he stopped going to seminars three months before graduation. Madeleine chose to deconstruct his absence as him having dumped her and so it was that she had allowed another student to come on her dress.

"We must hurry, or we'll be late for graduation," said Mitchell.

"Haven't you heard?" said her room mate. "Leonard has been in a mental hospital for the past three months."

"Marry me, Madeleine," Leonard begged, as she entered the psych ward.

Any number of thoughts might have entered the readers' mind at this point. How did Madeleine fail to realise Leonard was bonkers from the start? Why did she not bother to find out Leonard was in hospital earlier? And was this the dullest love triangle in literature? But we cannot allow ourselves to enter the realms of sub-text or meta-text; instead we must stay with text and pursue our characters through to the bitter end.

Mitchell was alone in a Parisian hotel, pining for Madeleine, whom he had kissed just before he left New York. How had he got there? Well, he'd set off to Europe, armed with loads of books on which he would frequently discourse at length with his friend Larry, who had come to see his feminist girlfriend but turned out to be gay. Meanwhile, Leonard was trying to lose weight. How had he got to that point? Well, he'd become distrustful of the lithium and the steroids he had been prescribed and had been trying to wean himself off the drugs, both so that he could get a decent erection and clear his mind for his research.

Madeleine wondered why she had married Leonard. A not unreasonable question, one might have thought, were it not that the narrative was going to take yet another backward leap to again fail to explain why. Like Leonard and Mitchell, she was stuck in a fictive trope and condemned to be a stylistic, one-dimensional irritation.

Mitchell too was in despair; not so much because he had been unable to persuade Madeleine to leave Leonard, but because he knew he was getting on everyone's nerves by going on for 70 pages about his religious enlightenment and Mother Teresa, yet was powerless to do anything about it because he didn't really exist. He might have felt a little better if he had known Leonard was also feeling the same way. How he longed to say he wasn't just a cocktail of drugs and bipolar symptoms and that being depressed didn't mean he had to be so depressing.

Finally, Leonard cracked. "I'm divorcing you, Madeleine," he said.

"I guess this is the moment in romantic fiction when you decide you're in love with the good guy," said Mitchell. "But this is a postmodern romantic novel, so I'm going to leave you to be happy by yourself."